Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV); Assurance; Report on Active Monitoring and Failure Detection

The present document develops a report detailing methods for active monitoring of VNFs, NFVI and E2E network services and detection of failures. It addresses the following two aspects of active monitoring:

1. Periodic testing of VNFs and service chains in a live environment to ensure proper functionality and performance adherence to SLAs.
2. Failure prevention and detection - Active monitoring methods for failure prevention (proactive) or timely detection and recovery from failures. Failures include loss or degradation of network connectivity, loss or degradation of session capacity, loss of services, VM failures, VM stalls, etc.

The present document proposes that the monitoring agents be on boarded into the NFV environment, just like other VNFs.